Incredibly, it seems anyone in the world can find a rotting dead body in that borderland between a rural area and civilization or between water and land, take a photo, and declare it “mysterious,” nowadays.

Perhaps this is a result of all those years of finding dead canids and the media labeling them “Chupacabras” and “Maine Mutants,” or of tripping over beached dead raccoons and seals and seeing them sensationalized as the “Montauk Monster” and the “Croyde Carcass”?

Now there is a new case about another local find, which seems as if will turn out to be nothing unusual. Investigator Javier Ortega emails me that he “came across a TV station report from Chile about a mystery carcass that was found washed ashore in Chile.”

Let me state, I only post about this to hopefully nip it in the bud!

Javier Ortega has passed along his translation of the video:

Husband being interviewed: We were hiking for the day with our kids.
Wife: It has hair, wool, hoofs like a goat and fins.
Husband: We found it, and honestly do not know what it is.
Wife: It has hide like a baboon, wool…

Reporter: A better way of describing the strangeness of this creature does not exist. It has hooves like a goat and arms that arm as long as it’s entire body. At the end of the arms it has a type of fin, that resembles that of a duck’s membrane on it’s feet. It has wool, but also has hair. A jaw that would make you cringe. The find was done by tourists form Iquique Chile that were on a camping trip.

Husband: It’s hind legs are like hooves, while it’s front legs are some type of fin like hands at the end.
Wife: It has a long base on the jaw, with a pronounced row of bottom teeth…it’s like a mixture of different animals in one. It has a lot of different and unusual parts, from the top to the bottom.

Reporter: Upon our reporting, members of the National Agriculture service came to our station to try and figure out exactly what we are looking at.

Marcelo Cortes (Agriculture service director): What we need to do before declaring what the creature is, is to go to where the body was found to get better information. We will have to travel to the location to study it and see if what we are dealing with is a carcass of a local animal or that of some type of extinct creature.

Reporter: The apocalyptic look of this creature was not enough for the members of the National Agriculture service to determine exactly what it is, so they will travel to the location to figure it out with certainty the origin of this strange creature.Source.

Hey, sorry to mention it, but if it looks like it is attached to the feet of a goat, the animal in question is probably a dead goat.

What these people, including the Ag folks demonstrate, once again, is that most members of the general public (especially tourists in areas they are visiting?) don’t know animals, don’t look at the parts of rotting corpses objectively, and just don’t realize that most places have dead animals (usually dogs and domestic stock) that do die around the landscape.

At least Javier was honest. He admitted in his blog that the only animal knowledge he really has is about dogs and “some turtles.” He came openmindedly to the question, looking for answers.

Too bad the agriculture services guys weren’t as forthright in acknowledging their lack of awareness about what dead domestic animals look like. What is the logic behind giving as one of your options that this carcass might be “some type of extinct creature”? Forgive me, but that’s just unbelievable.

About Loren ColemanLoren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013.

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9 Responses to “Chilean Carcass: Non-Mystery”

Goat. The hooves should tell anyone all they need to know, but one look at the lower jaw and the gap between the front “biting” teeth and the rear chewing teeth cinches it.

One thing that this video provides that the still photos of the “Montauk Monster” didn’t is a sense of scale. When I first saw the “Montauk Monster,” I thought “raccoon,” but it was difficult to gauge the actual size of the carcass — it looked to big to be a raccoon. Last week I spoke to a young lady who saw and touched the Montauk carcass, and her estimation of the total length of the thing was between twelve and eighteen inches — considerably smaller that it appeared in the photos. Proof that even “good” photographic evidence can lead to erroneous conclusions.

Oh for heaven’s sakes! Must have been a really slow news day in Chile for a goat carcass to make headlines.

This kind of stuff makes me despair more and more about “mainstream” journalists. I can understand if it comes from the Enquirer, Daily Star, Midnight Globe etc. But too many supposedly “serious” news organizations are picking up and running with this nonsense.

Hey, maybe we’re just reverting to what papers did in the 19th century – filling space with their little oddball cryptid stories

Calling All TV Stations and CNN News Flash! Dead animal found beside highway. It had feet that were mashed flat (fins of course), a flattened head with protruding eyes (some kind of chup-bat boy govt experiment, of course), fur or scattered hair like skin with lots of blood (blood drinking and alien skin), and caused local traffic to keep a distance due to toxic breath (poison emitting to kill it quarry). Local highway cleanup crew says they have seen them before, BUT ONLY on the road or right next to the pavement. Souvenir picture and DNA samples available (for only a few dollars).

This is exactly why it is so hard getting accurate descriptions of cryptids (especially the swimming variety), because people seem to relate what they are seeing as to what they know, or more accurately, to what they think they know.

AND, as was said above, it does appear that many people do not have much knowledge of animals and especially not in a deceased state.

That is why Nessie has come back having been described as having a dog’s, goat, turtle, horse and sheep’s head in sightings. People relate things to what they are familiar with (And yes, I know the scoftics at large will point to this as evidence that the eye witness cannot be trusted because of such, but of course this line of reasoning cannot be applied across the board to all sightings, which is the shortfall of this argument).

This is a good lesson for us here, and good example of what how and why you have to ask lots of questions of eye witnesses to make sure you are getting as accurate a description or sighting as possible. Heck asking the same question three times in different ways to see if information jibes is a good idea.